§ 39

Never were seen healthier children or more honest countenanced people—the men at the labour, the women at their looms. The men are hunters, too. They employ the ancient bow and arrow, so the sweet silence is not spoiled by the irritating sound of firearms so closely connected with war and all its abominations. The skins of stags and roe deer form winter garments made at home, for there are no shops here. Every household provides its own needs. Here and there are artificial lakes where the people bathe and swim. After all, a primitive life is the natural one, to which we soon revert when the artificiality of life in cities is far distant.

There are millions of acres of these forests growing up in Britain now. There is a population growing thereon second to none in the country for healthy manhood and industrious, thrifty womanhood. Two generations of such a healthy state of things is enough to eliminate the supineness of so-called civilised life. I saw no complicated machinery. The axe and double-handed saw does well, if leisurely, all necessary work for a generation that is learning that speed is not essential to good workmanship or sustained trade! Light railways driven by electricity take the timber to its destination, but I noticed that few people travel in them. They have lost a restless spirit, being content with the interests provided by their environment. Learned in their craft and entertained by the practice of it, these foresters have little need for books, but I did hear that story-tellers visit them in winter time, and that they act plays among themselves, and well can I imagine the big log fires, the warm ale, the venison and fish suppers and the story-telling, delightful and simple, of these forest folk. I imagined that a new folklore was dawning and new poets might come out of this natural life. One thing we may be sure of. A new life will set in motion a new set of ideas; new, anyway, to modern minds, but ancient in their simplicity and growth under identical circumstances. I heard it said that this new life is productive of Romance, and is very satisfying to that part of the human that asks for it. There is a great deal left still in us which is closely allied to the instincts of our forefathers. The temptation to roam is less acute now. Romance, badly needed by all of us, is found in the new life. What a contrast this is to the impositions of ruthless industrialism, that Juggernaut, that tyrannical destroyer of agricultural life, that brutalising devastator of Beauty, that cold but systematised muck rake, which, while it pretended to give liberty, was making slaves, which, while it was providing a Health Minister, was destroying health, and while providing artificial wealth was destroying the soul of the people, because it was withdrawing them from simple and leading them to artificial pleasures, and so was breeding discontent. What is necessary for the future of England is industry less concentrated in cities, more extended over the whole country, and this industry of Forestry is one act in the new drama that is doing it.

The new life is recreating honesty and straight dealing. Once corrupt, Borough and County Councils are composed of honourable men, not of selfish class legislators. Jobbery, that fatal failing among tradesmen who formed the majority in the old system of municipal rule, is at a minimum, it was in a maximum. Unscrupulous agitators have been found out and given a dismissal. Trades unions, not in principle bad, only bad as far as they became decadent, played an artificial game, have been broken up by the people, who discovered before it was too late that a tyranny of the gravest character was being enacted and growing stealthily was ruining a class under the pretence of giving power to it. The great war proved that as a class tradesmen are untrustworthy; as individuals there is good in them, but the nature of their education being, “Get all you can, at whatever cost to your neighbour,” is a policy the reverse of a good one. As soon as these things were realised by the people they began to see straight. Blinkers were withdrawn from their eyes and they looked right and left for the cause of impending disaster. The people, led now by honesty and intelligence in place of crafty subterfuge, know that industry, not industrialism, is the key to happiness. By largely extended agriculture, the necessities, indeed, most of the luxuries of life, can be secured. More grass, more beasts, more cows, sheep and goats, more milk, more wool, more hides, more grain, more bread, more cheap and good houses for workmen and craftsmen. No smoke, more sun, hence a quicker ripening of grain and fruit. Hence finer energies, more vitality, and less discontent. The invasion of industrialism has been the creation of an enemy to light, to joy, to freedom. To turn a man into a machine is to contradict the first elements of his creation. To put him on a level with a screwdriver, a hammer, a grease-pot, is to lower him all round. Why does it lower him? Because it kills his individuality, blunts his ambition, and destroys his creative faculty. Hand labour is dignified, but a man reduced to the level of a machine is a cripple.

The industrious class, of which happily many remained, even under depressing environment and determined to earn honest money, emancipated themselves from their evil leaders who would, but for the remnant of honest men left, have destroyed their freedom. Never in the ugly history of agitators did they give themselves away more successfully than when they threatened to starve England by direct action to gain an addition to already good wages. At once, this was a little too much for the people. “If England starves, we shall,” was their logical conclusion. If production is strangled by unreasonable wages, the time will come when there is no money left to pay a reasonable wage. In revolution, it always happens that extremists break the bank they sought to enrich. The good sense at the bottom of the English character prevailed; and even if slowly, it overcame. The people began to see that once loosened from the chain their mischievous leaders had wound round them that antagonism between class and class is fatal to peace and progress, to realise that the rise in prices was the work of profiteering tradesmen, and to them the onus of the necessity for a rise in wages was chiefly due. The profiteering tradesman was their enemy, not the capitalist. Then they said among themselves, “We must get to work like honest men and give the best that is in us. We must improve and not strangle British trade, if we do we shall be the first to suffer.” We must not trust to foreign countries to produce for us, but produce for ourselves. He who trusts to purchase the necessities of life from foreign neighbours may some day find they have nothing to sell.

There is nothing in this that is new or original, it is the commonest common sense. It was by trying to escape labour and to put it into foreign hands and secure profit that England was growing idle. Trade was given over to the Germans, who, seeing they could produce more cheaply than the English because they paid lower wages, grew rich at the expense of England. England had the most industrious workmen in Europe, and the best, but by teaching them to shirk work, trades unions gave them away. In the new order this is changed. The workmen know now that to labour honestly brings not only pleasure but profit. The idle inherit poverty and discontent. The Germans said to themselves, “British labour in a state of unrest brings profit to us. Britain poor means Germany rich.” Germans are cunning.